The words, the visions, grew ever more fantastic.
There was a time when the local schoolmaster would have applauded Grant very strongly for the striking way in which he sustained the British mythology against the Roman, Scandinavian or even Hellenic, not to mention the Hebraic. From his high horse, the archaeologist commanded the knights of the Round Table, set the whole Arthurian epic to the splendid movements of chivalry. What other body of myth in the history of the world, the whole world west to east, he demanded to know, had produced so lofty a concept of human behaviour or so wonderful an expression of it in literature? Romance that was poetry in essence; Irish colour and craftsmanship and saga; Welsh legend and poetry; all these islands, indeed, as the original home of the druidic mystique, beautiful and precise, magical and living. And if that was so—and who could gainsay it from all the evidence?—then at least the root of the matter was in us, and surely therefore the exploring of so potent a root was something more, and higher, than a futile spying or indulgence in curiosity, even if it took a no more distinguished form than the opening of a chambered cairn in a Highland clachan.
Martin watched the coloured procession with a detachment that at moments almost seemed interested. The word druidic even brought a smile. His eyes moved about the archaeologist’s face and steadied once upon a fume of bubble at the lips, curious to observe how small specks of it were liberated upon the air.
“I thought these druids performed in oak groves,” he said, “not at cairns or in stone circles.”
“We know little enough about how or where they behaved and then mostly from foreign sources. You might as well say that people were silent in their ceremonies at your cairn in Clachar because we do not know the tongue they spoke.”
“Wasn’t it some kind of Celtic tongue?”
“The Neolithic people did not speak even any kind of Aryan tongue, much less a specific Celtic. It was an archaic tongue of which we know nothing.”
“And it died with them?”
“No. It just died, but not with them. They took the invaders tongue, perhaps Pictish; but they lived on.”
“I thought we didn’t know much about the Picts’ language?”
“Neither we do, because there were more invaders and a new tongue called Gaelic. And you, who are still Neolithic in your bones, literally in your bones, actually speak yet another invaders’ language called English.”
“The bones remain but the languages die?”
“More than the bone remains.”
“And how are you so sure about my bones?”
“Because to be sure is part of my business as an archaeologist. I see the bone of your skull as I see the bones in your ankles.”
“And all this amounts to—what?”
“To knowledge.” And Grant lifted his glass and drank.
The analysis of the meaning of knowledge produced a considerable amount of arid sound, though the archaeologist achieved one or two interesting arabesques even here, until at last he swept the whole thing aside, including his glass which he retrieved unbroken from the earthen floor, and said that for him all this had yet a profounder significance, for knowledge qua knowledge was but the tools and the material.
“A moral significance?”
“Yes,” said Grant like a shot. Then he waved a dismissive left hand. “I am aware of the inflection in your voice. Let us dismiss the word moral. We can dismiss any number of words; if an abstract word offends you we can cut it out. There is nothing abstract in the significance I mean. There is, on the contrary, all that which, being alive, is potent and life-making, not life-destroying. The chivalry to which I have referred, the literature, the song, Arthur and Ossian, the craft of the hands, the colour, the greatness of the body in its tragic bearing, the courage—the courage that does not give in, that—that takes its gruel and fights on and pursues the high thing and the right thing though the heavens should come down in small bits.”
“A moral lesson?”
Grant stared at his glass, in no way self-conscious, but as one brooding a little over the greatness he had heard, even while its echoes passed away. Martin filled the glass once more, spilling a little of the liquor on the stone. The spilling produced a momentary wavering in Grant’s vision so that the stone tilted. He realised for the first time that he was getting drunk, but this drunkenness was a peculiar phenomenon, like a transparent screen between one world and another, and it shivered like a screen, wavered, so that what was known to be there was not quite seen, but did not need to be seen because it was known. He became aware that Martin was talking. With a peculiar deliberation, strangely in contrast with his recent visionary flights, he listened, looking at the face before him and seeing it with a remarkable clarity, so that it was no longer strange to him and unknown, so that even its death instinct was not a positive thing, a destructive force, but simply that condition which had been left when the positive had ebbed away. It was a face stranded on the modem shore.
“These primitive Celts, they ate each other,” Martin concluded, “they were cannibals.”
“That may be,” answered the archaeologist with profound solemnity, “but if so, at least they ate each other formally.”
Martin did not laugh. His face was arrested in an extraordinary, an involuntary stillness.
“All primitive peoples,” continued Grant, “have such formalities, such courtesies. If they eat the body it is always the body of the enemy, never their own bodies, and they do so in order to acquire his virtue and his strength and his valour.”
“This they do in remembrance of him,” said Martin.
Grant met the eyes and cried wildly, challengingly, “Yes! Why not? Why shouldn’t they? It might be better for us if we still remembered. But we don’t. We have lost the love of God and the understanding of sacrifice. We destroy Christ’s body. We smash it to smithereens and dissipate it from our sight. We truss it up and bayonet it and leave it for the jackals. We destroy because we hate. We hate. We hate ourselves all. And because it feeds on itself, hatred is the ultimate cannibal that eats its own body.” He stretched for his glass and missed it, but caught it at the second attempt. The stone, however, tilted further this time. The liquor from the glass ran over his hand as he assumed a completely recumbent position. But he was growing weary of all this talk, and not without dignity he composed himself on the yielding softness of the hard floor and closed his eyes.
He opened them on the bare hillside.